A lovely article about people who vanish from football terraces reminded me of familiar faces from long-lost record shops

Another post in my occasional series of “Well, I enjoyed this, so you might enjoy it too” series, this time with a football and record shop theme.

There was a lovely piece on the Guardian website a few days ago called “What becomes of diehard football fans who stop going to matches?” by Donald Walker, which was based around his experiences at East Fife, but touched on themes that apply wider to that one club and, for me, beyond football.

Walker had spent time either tracking down well-known characters who used to be on the terraces and then stopped going and explained to him why, or recounted the memories of particular characters who just suddenly never appeared again and nobody really found out what happened.

The assumption, of course, is some of those fans just died, whereas in other cases Walker found, for example, one guy who just said, and I quote, “he was done. Not coming back. Finito. Aye, we thought, a likely story. He will get over it. They always do. And yet, it turned out he was not kidding.”

With my morbid hat on it does make me cast forward to the fact some day I will go to my last Leyton Orient game. Maybe some of the people around me will, after a few weeks or months, think, what happened to that guy who used to always be here in an AEK Athens hat and a Doctor Who scarf and sometimes bought his kids but very rarely talked to anybody. Then in my mind they will mutter under their breath “The fucking weirdo.”

I sit in the north stand at Orient at the moment, but I initially had my ticket in the west stand, nearly a decade ago. I sometimes strain to look at the block where I used to sit, thinking about a couple of people who really stuck in my mind from sitting there. They don’t ever seem to be in their seats anymore. Maybe like me they moved seats. Maybe they were just “done”. Maybe it is the other option.

Casting further back, I first went to Brisbane Road in the 1970s, but only first went through a period of regularly attending in the early 90s.

Me and sometimes one, two, three mates would stand on the north terrace, now demolished and underneath where I sit at games in 2025.

We used to go and stand in about the same place, and all those decades ago there was one old guy with a Cornish/Devon accent who always used to shout “C’mon now!” and it used to make us laugh so much the way he did.

He was not perhaps as memorable as the “Fintry Fifer” in Walker’s article, but reading it made me think of the “C’mon now!” man, and that presumably at the moment my plaintive shouts of “Ref!” and “Lino! You saw that!” are potentially somebody else’s “C’mon now!”.

[Leyton Orient north terrace at some point in about the 1990s]

That “C’mon now!” man I’m sure is long gone from this world, but one thing that still happens to me is I will occasionally spot someone in the street who I used to serve when they were a regular customer at the Walthamstow record shop I used to work in.

It always warms my heart when I see them. Haven’t seen them for years, haven’t thought about them for years, and then suddenly crash-zoom I feel “Oh, I am glad you are still alive, and I am still alive” and suddenly I’m thinking about 1989 again.

Also so bizarre that I imagine, 35 years later, they absolutely would not recognise me from Adam, but, thanks to my excitingly weird brain, I can remember exactly what their music taste was and what records they used to buy.

I’m always fascinated by how if you see a train or a plane go past, you are just a tiny speck of background radiation in somebody else’s life, a dot that they glanced at while going about their business, and I think in his piece Walker captures well that feeling of knowing and recognising and then remembering regular people in a closed setting like a football ground or record shop without ever really knowing them at all.

Anyway, if I haven’t enticed you to read the Donald Walker article yet, can I tease you into it by offering this gorgeous paragraph from it…

“In the 1980s, as a shy and impressionable teenager, I was fascinated by an unusual figure on the terraces who seemed to come from another world. That much was true, because this person came from Glasgow, and yet was a faithful follower of a football team in Fife. Even more intriguing was the air of urbane about him: mid 20s, tweed jacket, moustache, Hamlet cigar, and always carrying a Virgin Records poly bag containing – mystery of mysteries – the latest addition to his LP collection, bought on the way to the game in some big city or another. He became known as ‘Mr Virgin Records’ because we didn’t know his real name.”

You can read that article in full here: What becomes of diehard football fans who stop going to matches?